Video of torture by police shocks Egyptians

CAIRO, Egypt — The bus driver's face is twisted in agony, staring up from a white tile floor within a ring of shoes. His screams are high-pitched and panicked.

He has been stripped from the waist down; men believed to be Egyptian police officers hold his legs aloft and taunt him as they sodomize him with a rod the size of a broomstick.

The video, which lawyers and human-rights workers say was captured on a mobile telephone by a police officer, made its way onto Egyptian blogs earlier this winter. Passed along by angry activists, the clip sent outrage racing through the capital.

Human-rights workers say that applying electric shocks to genitals, beating and hanging people in uncomfortable positions are common practice in the jails and police stations of Egypt, a key U.S. ally.

But the video deeply troubled this sexually conservative society. It was hauntingly personal, putting an agonized face on a crime that usually stays out of sight, in the shadows of the security service buildings, obscured by fear and shame.

The torture scandal has erupted while many Egyptians believe the United States, spooked by the rise of Islamists and distracted by the war in Iraq, has abandoned its push for democratic reform in the region.

"Torture is pervasive in detention centers in Egypt. It's completely commonplace, even for petty crimes, for detainees to be tortured," said Elijah Zarwan, a Cairo-based representative of Human Rights Watch, who has closely monitored the bus driver's travails. "In this case it seems like it was just simple cruelty. They wanted to teach him a lesson."

The man in the video was Imad Kabir, 21, a minibus driver from a scruffy neighborhood a few miles from downtown Cairo. Kabir was arrested in January 2006 after a fight broke out between police and neighborhood residents.

Before he was allowed to walk out of the police station after being released on bail, Kabir was systematically beaten and raped.

Afterward, police broadcast the video by Bluetooth throughout his neighborhood in what Zarwan said was a warning to other drivers. After hearing about the rape from the neighbors, his father died of a stroke, Kabir's lawyer said.

In response, the Egyptian government slapped two of the police officers from the Bulaq Al Dakrur station into prison. They will stand trial in March.

But Kabir also has been imprisoned. Notwithstanding the public punishment he endured, this month the bus driver was sentenced to three months in prison for last winter's dustup with police. Human-rights workers say he is at risk of further torture while in custody.

A few years ago, the U.S. began to push for democratic reform in Egypt, and a spark of hope was kindled among activists here. Apparently responding to U.S. pressure, President Hosni Mubarak put himself up for re-election in 2005.

But the conduct of the elections was heavily criticized, and the push for democracy appears to have petered out.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice passed through Cairo last week without a word of public criticism for the regime.

While Kabir got no help from either the United States or the Egyptian regime after the torture video, aid came from his fellow Egyptians and from the mobile-telephone cameras and blogs that are slowly revolutionizing the Arab world.

"It made a huge reaction from people. People even vomited when they saw it," said Mohammed Abdullah Khaled, 24, who first posted the video on his blog, demaghmak.blogspot.com. "People had a certain idea about what's happening in police stations, but nobody ever saw it with their eyes."